Suga calls time on a sad year running Japan

Who wants to be a national leader in the pandemic era? Yoshihide Suga declared he was done after a year and relinquished leadership of Japan, which is wrestling with an inconsistent economic recovery and soaring infections. Governing in the Covid years is especially fraught for premiers that lack a popular mandate; it’s hard enough for those who actually won elections.
Suga may go down in history as the guy who had the misfortune to rise from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) backroom, only to get lumbered with an Olympic Games that Japanese were deeply ambivalent about and the delta variant. His brief administration was an asterisk to the eight years of Shinzo Abe, who was Japan’s longest serving prime minister and Suga’s mentor.
The games themselves, which Abe had hoped to preside over until illness caused him to stand down in August 2020, weren’t the disaster that many feared. That low bar did nothing for Suga’s popularity, which began crumbling soon after he took the baton from Abe. The economy, the world’s third largest, is stop-start. A robust recovery last year began to run out of steam as infections soared and commercially vital parts of the country instituted restrictions on social and business life.
The LDP now can head to national elections in a few months with a fresh face. Suga was the necessary sacrifice to boost the party’s prospects. By announcing he won’t contest the coming internal party leadership ballot, Suga bowed out as head of government. The LDP’s majority in parliament is formidable, but that was a product of Abe’s dominance. There’s little prospect the party, which has led most governments since the end of World War II, will be defeated. Under Suga, there was a probability of it losing some ground, however. His possible successors include Taro Kono, the government’s vaccine czar and also a former foreign minister, as well as Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister.
As the election approaches, it’s likely the party will resort to one of its favorite rituals: more fiscal stimulus and pork barrel projects. Japanese stocks jumped to a three-decade high on the announcement of Suga’s departure.

—Bloomberg